Locals: Turkey’s Crackdown on Kurdish Towns Increasingly Violent

While Turkey continues to hype its military operations against towns in the southeast as part of the war against the PKK, with an eye toward “cleansing” the country of PKK separatists, locals complain the operations are increasingly bloody.

To make matters worse, the attacks are largely indiscriminate, with Turkish military forces imposing a full curfew on those towns, and firing against anything that moves. Wounded civilians are basically stuck in their homes, with no way to get to hospitals, and no way for doctors to reach them.

Turkey insists the operations are very precise, and hit militants who are active in affected neighborhoods, but locals point to a growing number of women, children, and the elderly killed in the operations to dispute those claims.

Turkey has been at war with the PKK for over 30 years, but had a ceasefire in place until this fall, when the Erdogan government abandoned the ceasefire and launched a new offensive against PKK targets inside Iraq. This has since escalated, and they’ve ruled out any return to a truce.

Of course, if Mr. Putin's government had been doing this, we would never hear the end of it. Come to think of it, the Washington Post published an editorial last week criticizing Russian attacks on civilians in Syria. I haven't seen anything about Turkey yet. Also, one of the criticisms of Syria's Bashar Asad is that he "kills his own people." Mr. Erdogan seems to be doing the same thing, but nothing out of the Wash Post yet.

Thing about those killing-his-own-people types… …is that nobody really cares until their alleged activity is convenient to another agenda. Especially the agenda of wrecking his country to a greater extent than he could've managed himself while imagining one's self the to-be recipient of flowers & candy flung from throngs of the thankful. Wallah! Then he's 'evil.' The perennial do-gooder also rarely apologizes…